Beatles – Album tracks and B-Sides Vol. 1

My nephews, aged 18 and 16, surprised me over Christmas by suddenly taking an interest in the Beatles, after years of my futile attempts to prod them in that direction. The catalyst for them was the Love album of remixes and mash-ups, which I found interesting rather than exciting. Their favourite tune, played ad nauseam, was Hey Jude; a typical portal kind of songs for people starting to get into the Beatles (and one I am sick of hearing). Soon after they watched the film Across The Universe, and that deepened their interest in the Beatles (on the soundtrack, bloody Bono sings I Am The Walrus, the utterly predictable tosser). Others have been turned on to the Beatles by the entirely redundant 1 collection a few years ago.

So, if one plans to introduce a newcomer to the Beatles oeuvre, my suggestion would be to give them the red and blue albums, both excellent departure points for a Beatles journey. But these clearly cannot suffice. Ideally, one might then give such a nascent Beatles fan a few of the essential albums. But that might be overwhelming (and, to be honest, the White Album contains much off-putting crap among the obvious diamonds). With this in mind, my son and I compiled two volumes of album tracks and b-sides which we think are essential. The ground rule was simple: if it appeared on the red or blue albums (and therefore on 1), it was excluded. So in away these mixes are sequels of sorts, or extensions, to the 1973 albums. For those whose Beatles collection does not go beyond the red and blue albums, our mixes will doubtless fill a big gap; perhaps one or the other song will somebody go and buy a proper Beatles album.

Even limiting the number of songs to the CD-R limit of 80 minutes was a challenge, requiring lots of debate and tough decisions (I had to give up Good Day Sunshine, Any Minor Dude had to forfeit much of Help!). The sequence of tracks follows roughly in the order in which they were recorded, rather than following a chronology of release dates. This is less an issue in the 1962-66 collection, but becomes a problem in the 1967-70 mix, since the material for Let It Be was recorded before but released after Abbey Road. That mix should go up next week.

The file includes all recording dates of songs on this mix, as well as a front and back cover in jpeg and PDF format (for easy printing out).

TRACKLISTING:1. P.S. I Love You
2. Do You Want To Know A Secret
3. I Saw Her Standing There
4. It Won’t Be Long
5. I’ll Get You
6. Tell Me Why
7. This Boy
8. I Wanna Be Your Man
9. I Should Have Known Better
10. If I Fell
11. I Call Your Name
12. I’ll Be Back
13. Any Time At All
14. Things We Said Today
15. Baby’s In Black
16. I’m A Loser
17. No Reply
18. Every Little Thing
19. I’ll Follow The Sun
20. She’s A Woman
21. I Need You
22. You’re Going To Lose That Girl
23. I’m Down
24. It’s Only Love
25. I’ve Just Seen A Face
26. If I Needed Someone
27. You Won’t See Me
28. Think For Yourself
29. Tomorrow Never Knows
30. Rain
31. And Your Bird Can Sing32. I’m Only Sleeping
33. For No One

I’ve grown pretty bored with the standard canon of Beatles tunes everybody recognizes as great–this stuff is an excellent antidote to the boredom. What I love about this selection is that you adopted a fine and rigorous methodology for selecting them, which provides space for some lesser-known gems to rise to the top. Thanks a lot.

You dudes done good!I agree with all those comments, and second JB, in that it’s cool to have the ‘lesser-known’ gems in there.I’ve got all (most of) the Beatles stuff, but none of it is on my hard drive, This, then, is a welcome collection.